FOSTER CITY / Missing but not forgotten / Families of soldiers seek answers from Dept. of Defense

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 26, 2006

Photo: Shelley Eades

Image 1of/2

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 2

-

-

Photo: Shelley Eades

Image 2 of 2

Anna May Stillford, 80, of Fair Oaks, Calif. gets her mouth swabbed by Armed Forces DNA Analyst Chad Ernst in hopes of helping the search for her brother Herman Louise Graff who went missing in the Korean War. Stillford attended an event hosted by The Defense Department at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Foster City where families of servicemen and women are updated on loved ones who went missing in action in conflicts, mainly from World War II up through Vietnam.
Shelley Eades/ The Chronicle less

Anna May Stillford, 80, of Fair Oaks, Calif. gets her mouth swabbed by Armed Forces DNA Analyst Chad Ernst in hopes of helping the search for her brother Herman Louise Graff who went missing in the Korean War. ... more

Photo: Shelley Eades

FOSTER CITY / Missing but not forgotten / Families of soldiers seek answers from Dept. of Defense

1 / 2

Back to Gallery

Barbara Novak remembers her big brother as an easygoing, good-humored guy who pushed her on a swing set and hoisted her on his shoulders when he came home on military leave.

"He was like a lot of young men at the time -- he wanted to serve his country," said Novak, 64, who lives in Livermore. "He had a lot of pride, and we were all very proud of him."

But on July 12, 1950, Pvt. Nicholas John Hansinger, a medic in the Korean War, was captured and marched to a prison camp in North Korea, where he apparently died three months later at age 19. His remains were never found.

LATEST SFGATE VIDEOS

Hansinger is one of 88,000 U.S. soldiers considered missing in action, mostly from World War II, Korea, the Cold War and Vietnam. Still haunted by his disappearance and presumed death, Novak went to a Department of Defense meeting in Foster City Saturday to see if, 56 years later, the military was any closer to finding him.

"When I told them his name, I got tears in my eyes," she said. "Even though he's been missing such a long time, he's still a family member and you want to bring him home."

Novak wasn't alone. About 150 relatives of other missing soldiers came from throughout California in hopes of finding relief to their decades-long grief.

The military has declared almost all of the soldiers dead, for purposes of insurance and benefits. But until the remains are found, identified and returned, the military has a "moral commitment" to keep searching, said DOD spokesman Larry Greer.

"These families have given the lives of a loved one," he said. "The country owes them something. We owe them answers."

The Department of Defense spends $105 million a year scouring battlefields, jungles and crash sites around the world for skeletal fragments of U.S. soldiers. The remains are then sent to a lab for DNA tests and then hopefully matched with the DNA samples from family members. To complete the picture of how the soldiers died, forensic anthropologists and military historians try to piece together chaotic battle scenes, isolated plane crashes and mysterious disappearances.

One such disappearance is that of Capt. Fred Henry, last seen fighting on a hill in Korea in 1950, firing at the enemy while his troops could get to safety.

"He vanished. There's no trace of him. They went back the next day to look for his body, but there was nothing," said his niece, Chrissy Stroh of Sacramento. "The not knowing is hard. I don't think you ever get closure when you lose someone you love, but it's hard because you wait and you wait and you just hope you hear something before you die."

Every day researchers find a few more remains, but with 88,000 missing -- many at the bottom of the ocean or lost in remote jungles -- it's a daunting task.

To keep families updated and collect as much DNA as possible, the department visits cities around the country to meet with soldiers' relatives. The vast majority -- 78,000 -- of the missing soldiers were lost in World War II, largely due to sunken submarines, planes shot down over the ocean and less sophisticated record-keeping. About 8,100 are still lost in Korea, 1,807 are missing from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and 125 are missing from spy plane crashes during the Cold War.

Gini Krippner of Coursegold (Madera County) has spent years researching the fate of her uncle, Capt. Howard Krippner, whose plane was shot down over farmland in central China on Aug. 27, 1943. She pinpointed the crash site and made a pilgrimage there last year, when villagers held a traditional funeral for Krippner and the other soldiers in the plane, who were defending China from invading Japanese.

But it's still not enough for Gini Krippner. She came to the Foster City meeting with her parents in hopes of obtaining one more shred of news about her uncle's body, which she believes was removed by Japanese forces soon after the crash.

"It's important to us. He was a hero in our family," said Gini Krippner's mother, Virginia Krippner, also of Coursegold.

Gini's father, Everett Krippner, was, like his brother, also a bomber pilot in World War II. After the war he went on to be a commercial pilot, farmer, elementary school teacher and superintendent, but the family was never able to shake the long shadow of grief from Howard's death.

"Howard was my dad's favorite," said Everett Krippner, who grew up in Seattle. "The family was hurt pretty bad. My dad particularly."

The senior Krippner spent the rest of his life chasing leads on his son's fate, but never found any answers. He died in 1982.

When asked why it's important to keep searching for clues more than 60 years after the fact, Gini Krippner's eyes welled with tears.

"My dad's not going to be around much longer," she said, wiping her eyes. "This is for him. It's a gift to him."

Some families travel around the country repeatedly going to Department of Defense family meetings. Greer said they sometimes find comfort in talking to other families and exchanging stories.

Robert Lopez of Long Beach and Lynne Lorang Rodgers of Crockett are good friends, drawn together by an ill-fated reconnaissance flight on May 15, 1946. Rodger's father was the pilot and Lopez' cousin was the navigator, and they both perished off the coast of Honshu, Japan when the plane's engine malfunctioned.

They both know the bodies will probably never be recovered, but they won't give up searching.

"If someone in your family was missing in action, wouldn't you want them to come home?" said Rodgers, who was 5 months old when her father died. "You don't want think of them at the bottom of the ocean somewhere."

These days, things are different. Soldiers get DNA tests when they enlist and wear so much high-tech tracking gear that almost no one is unaccounted for.

Only one soldier, Sgt. Matt Maupin, is missing in Iraq. He was captured from an armed convoy in 2004 and never seen again. Another soldier, Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, disappeared in Desert Storm when his plane crashed in Jan., 1991. His body was never found. No soldiers are missing from Afghanistan, Greer said.

Eventually, as generations die and family members forget, the unsolved mysteries will fade into history.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.